Where is the robust Story?

 

Where is the robust Story?

Where is the robust Story, strong enough 

to bear the weight of bodies and of souls,

to touch millennia of wounds and scars

softly, with healing,

and to feel billions of muscles

strain towards life?

Where are the benedictions that we crave 

when blessings seem in short supply?

Will we, like Jacob,

smelling like the hunters we are not

and wearing the skins of deception,

 steal from an unseeing one 

the blessing for which we thirst?

Or will we live our un-narrated lives,

and say, as Esau says, “I have enough”,

set out for the margin,

known from that moment on  

not as ourselves

but as our children?

Where is the story that will catch us

as we plummet from the brink, 

pushed off the page 

by our own bare adequacy,

by our having enough and no more?

Will we wrestle 

with a Stranger in our dream,

and seize our blessing

and receive our limp?

Will we fall and rise again

like Joseph, trafficked by his brothers – 

slave, prisoner, then unlikely hero

(who mines the truth of dreams) 

then slaves again, 

who flee the Pharoah-story 

that was once their home,

set out towards 

a freedom more confounding than their bonds,

a people waiting for more Story,

and for One who writes redemption?

We wait, too.

Where is the robust Story, strong enough

to bear the weight of Hagar, Esau,

jealous brothers, favouring mothers,

fathers who know the binding on Moriah

as their own, fathers who bless blindly 

and bless better than they know?

Where is the One who writes

a Story of redemption 

with a wounded hand – relentless, 

writes a glad river and a tree of life, 

for the healing of the nations,

and of us? – and of us all.